Angelica Hannan submitted two articles, including "The Debt of Nations: The need for the First World's Mea Culpa", to take shared second place in the 2006 Margaret Dooley Young Writers Award.
"Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will we realise that we cannot eat money."
—19th Century Cree Indian proverb
There exists an element operating within the Western structure of culture and politics which is perhaps the single, most powerful force motivating international relations, second only to security. And this element, whose importance is imposed in a cultural imperialist style by Western ideology onto the rest of the world, is responsible for the insurmountable and threatening dilemma of the debt of nations: money. As epitomised in this Cree Indian quote above, the West is a strict adherent to the principles of financial gain, even if it means that money takes precedence over human worth, human rights and human dignity. Third World debt truly is a moral problem of enormous proportions for which the causes and solutions are equally problematic.
Perhaps a primary cause of Third World debt may be attributed to a Westernised—but increasingly globalised—capitalist mentality that seeks to transform us all into "consumers, customers, and competitors". This philosophy creates the potential for an impersonal environment with the capacity for ruthlessness and a lack of ethics and compassion. The suggestion that we are all "competitors" merely euphemises Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest and appropriates it to the global economic arena. Christian de Brie once wrote that;
There is an attempt to submit the whole of human activity to the market order and the rule of profit. No sphere can escape this process, neither the protection of privacy, nor the right to breathe unpolluted air … Everything can become a commodity, including spirituality, and enter the circuits of capital totalitarian control over human and biological life and development ... Not a single country, not a single market, remains untouched.
The capitalist system currently dominating the global system is problematic for its presupposition that "the entire sphere of economic behaviour is regulated by an impersonal mechanism which is beyond the authority of morals". Furthermore, capitalism now seems to overpower the dominant religious tradition of Christianity, which condemns self-interest and materialism as moral vices.
It is this very approach that has generated a global crisis that